What To Do About Facebook Ruining Christmas

My friend Jay Baer has a great blog post on Facebook’s new policy around promotional content entitled “How Facebook Ruined Christmas.” Basically, as a brand, if your Facebook posts aren’t deemed useful, they won’t be included in the newsfeed… unless you pay Facebook to get them promoted.

Jay points out the earthquake that this change is causing in some brand social media departments as this once “free” promotional channel gets deprecated. Jay also forecasts that this is the way of the future and that it won’t be long until Instagram, Twitter and Pinterests also move to “pay-to-play” for brand promotions. What will Social Media Marketers do now?

We have a few thoughts to contribute to the conversation…

Create Help Not Hype: Dig deep and go back to the whiteboard. Brainstorm 30 things that your business can provide that is really, truly and deeply helpful to your customers. Prioritize by value and impact to the customer base. Now do it. Do it with style and without any strings attached. It works.

Distribute Social Content Across Channels: Many marketers think of their social program as a separate, isolated distribution channel. But social is also a massive content generation channel for both brand-made and fan-made content. But the lifespan of a tweet is 17 minutes and a Facebook status update is just a few hours. Extend the lifespan and the reach of your social content by syndicating into email marketing and social content hubs on your website.

Amplify Social Proof: Social proof is the secret weapon of brand Social Marketers. After all, 90% of people believe brand recommendations from their friends. Every comment, like, share, @mention or #hashtag is an opportunity for a brand to demonstrate social proof. Find, curate and distribute social proof onto your website, display ads and email marketing to boost positive sentiment.

What else? What tactics do you recommend to help Jay save Christmas from Facebook?